Republican Governor’s Betrayal in Vermont Shows How Public Ignorance Lets Practiced Liars Say Anything

Time was Vermont produced men like Ethan Allen, who had a differrent response for tyrants than obeying them. (1875 engraving depicting the capture of Fort Ticonderoga by Ethan Allen on May 10, 1775)

1,200 standard capacity 30-round magazines from MAGPUL Industries were supplied free-of-charge courtesy RECOIL magazine to Vermont gun owners in a protest operation appropriately called the “Green Mountain Airlift.” The magazines were distributed Saturday to gun owner rights demonstrators at the statehouse in Montpelier in anticipation of the governor signing a law banning them.

They were protesting bans on magazines, bans on rate-enhancing devices, bans on selling guns to citizens under 21, the end of private sales, due-process trampling confiscation orders, and more proposed infringements in the wings.

Mike Vanderboegh had an answer for those who would ban tools tyrants didn’t want their subjects to have.

Magazines owned before their banning will be “grandfathered,” although how that can be reliably verified is unclear. The giveaway is reminiscent of civil disobedience actions conducted by my late friend and colleague Mike Vanderboegh, although he smuggled ammunition and magazines into states (and sent to oath-breakers governing them) where band had been enacted as acts of defiance against edicts seen as unconstitutional and tyrannical:

“But even before the shot heard ’round the world, the colonists understood their weaknesses and their military needs and did something about it. They smuggled. They smuggled Dutch gunpowder and French flints. They smuggled tents and uniform cloth and artillery and ammunition. Boston was the high headquarters of anti-British smuggling and John Hancock was its prime minister. Connecticut was a small empire built on patriotic smuggling. The colonists knew what to do and they did it, regardless of the risk — regardless of all the King’s ministers and the King’s soldiery. They defied the King. They resisted his edicts. They evaded his laws and they smuggled. Lord above, did they smuggle.”

That’s part of the “I will not comply” paradigm popularized by Thoreau, and still available as a form of nullification for when all “legal” means of redress have been closed off from complying with a higher law, “the supreme Law of the Land.” It’s no different, morally, from refusing to obey edicts requiring firearms be surrendered, or disobeying orders to do the confiscation.

The real lawbreaking comes from those who would pass and enforce such totalitarian edicts under color of authority. And in this case, the villain is “Republican” Governor Phil Scott, who says he has “every intention of signing it.”

“What’s being passed at this point in time doesn’t intrude on the Second Amendment,” Scott flat-out lied. “It doesn’t take away their guns, and I believe that we will get accustomed to the new normal.”

How the fork-tongued weasel-worder figures these aren’t infringements is not stated. Of course they are, and the magazine limitation is a direct assault on Founding intent – as recognized by the Supreme Court — that the people have a right to “arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time [and] the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear … ordinary military equipment … that … could contribute to the common defense.”

As for this being “the new normal,” it won’t be for long. Once these points have been surrendered, the gun-grabbers will be back for more, and then there will be a new “new normal” – all the way down the “slippery slope” until the collectivists are ready to try for their end game, as treasonous ex- Supreme Court “Justice” John Paul Stevens made clear.

The new normal will be a monopoly of violence, exactly what the Founders opposed.

Time was, Vermont was the gold standard for the right to keep and bear arms, being relatively free of infringements to the point where permitless carry was once dubbed “Vermont carry.” Like everything else they touch, “progressives” in the state can’t resist tampering with freedom and imposing their obsession with control over everything.  This was, after all, the state that gave “us” the out-and-out national socialist Bernie Sanders for a presidential candidate.

It’s fair to wonder what Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys citizen militia would make of the mostly ungrateful and oblivious beneficiaries of the sacrifices they made to win liberty from despots.  Allen, too, was once declared an outlaw by a tyrannical governor for his acts of defiance.

I have a feeling Scott wouldn’t want to open the door.

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If you believe in the mission of Oath Keepers, to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, please make a donation to support our work.  You can donate HERE.

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David Codrea’s opinions are his own. See “Who speaks for Oath Keepers?”

The post Republican Governor’s Betrayal in Vermont Shows How Public Ignorance Lets Practiced Liars Say Anything appeared first on Oath Keepers.

Mueller Backers Should Be Confronted with His Past Hedging on Government Killing American Citizens on U.S. Soil

What’s there to be “unclear” about? This is the guy determining the fitness of others to govern? And politicians and the media are OK with that?

With the “official” media, Democrats and establishment Republicans forming a protective circle around U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, both he and his backers appear to have conveniently forgotten a past controversy that goes to the heart of government accepting Constitutional restraints on its power: How can anyone who took the oath be uncertain on whether or not the Constitution supports targeting American citizens for premeditated assassination on U.S. soil? Especially if that person is in a position of great power, and supposedly the top federal cop?

Searching for information on a different story, I came across this “blast from the past” on my The War on Guns blog. It appears to have sparked some initial and contained outrage on Fox News, but then was allowed to disappear and be forgotten by those who wanted that outcome (you can still search for it,but that assumes you know about it in the first place).

“Does that only apply to a U.S. citizen that’s overseas, or does that apply to a U.S. citizen that’s here?” Rep. Kevin Yoder asked then FBI Director Mueller about an order from Attorney General Eric holder authorizing the assassination of Americans fighting on the side of “terrorists.”

“I’d have to go back, I’m not certain whether that was addressed or not,” Mueller replied.

Watch for yourself:

Think about that and what it means about any orders he – or those working for him whose careers depend on carrying them out – would not obey. It makes it fair to ask if the so-called “Deep State” succeeds in its coup against the duly elected president and if patriots refuse to accept that, does Mueller think assassinating them would be Constitutional? And do his supporters think his hedging was in any way excusable?

Funny how none of the media or the “bipartisan pushers” praising the guy think any concerns over this are worth remembering, let alone mentioning. Maybe it’s time to start badgering for public statements from his backers, starting with career poltroons Thom Tillis and Lindsey Graham.

And as long as we’re taking a stroll down Memory Lane, Mike Vanderboegh had some Fast and Furious questions that have never been satisfactorily resolved, either. Like what was the FBI under Mueller’s role in “covering up the true circumstances of the murder of Brian Terry”?

Tangentially related, today marks one year since Mike was taken from us. Here’s what I wrote about his passing.

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If you believe in the mission of Oath Keepers, to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, please consider making a donation to support our work.  You can donate HERE.

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David Codrea’s opinions are his own. See “Who speaks for Oath Keepers?“

Colorado Second Amendment Rally Honors Three Percent Founder Mike Vanderboegh

Stewart Rhodes, Army Airborne Veteran, Yale Law School Graduate, OK Founder and President

Sheriff Richard Mack, Former Sheriff of Graham County, Arizona

John D. Shirley, Retired Duty Peace Officer - Houston, TX. National Lead Liaison to Peace Officers.

Jay Stang, Veteran US Marine Corps - Texas Chapter President

Jim Ayala, EMT Veteran, Oath Keepers Treasurer, Merchandise

Sgt. Maj. Joseph Santoro, Retired Army, infantry, EOD. OK National Operations NOC

Michele Imburgia, Texas State VP

Sheriff Denny Peyman, Retired Jackson County, KY Sheriff, OK National Peace Officer Liaison

John Kerriman, Current Missouri police academy instructor, police veteran, OK National Peace Officer/LEO Liaison

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Without Personal Consequences, Oversight Fast and Furious Report Brings No One Closer to Justice

To paraphrase a line from “The Dirty Dozen”: Very pretty. But can they fight? (House Oversight and Government Reform Committee )

“Committee releases Fast & Furious report: Obstruction of Congress by the Department of Justice,” a Wednesday House Oversight and Government Reform Committee press release reads. “Documents obtained after years of litigation reveal the full depth of DOJ’s obstructionist tactics.”

The Committee then lists “key takeaways” of the 263-page report, essentially claiming:

• Holder’s DOJ didn’t give a damn about slain Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s family.


• Holder’s DOJ conducted a sham “investigation” designed to spin rather than reveal.


• Holder’s DOJ didn’t give a damn about Congress.

Let me step back for a moment and allow Gomer to weigh in on this:

The Committee needed more documents to come to those conclusions? Really? And now that they have them, what are they going to do with them?

Are they going to subpoena characters like former National Security Council North American Affairs Director Kevin O’Reilly, rather than lamely accept his refusal to testify on why he requested information from ATF SAC William Newell and was then conveniently assigned out-of-country when questions started being asked? And why that refusal was insisted upon by the then-White House Counsel?

Are they going to do anything to find out what State (Hillary) knew and when it (she) knew it?

Are they planning on directing Holder to testify anew, and leveling any further charges? Like perjury?

Will anyone be held legally accountable for the hundreds of deaths from a cynical program designed, as an ATF insider noted early on, “to pad statistics” (as opposed to the ubiquitous (and demonstrably ridiculous) “botched gun sting” excuse promulgated by the media? Will anyone end up behind bars?

A promise is a promise, Mr. President.

It’s also fair to ask – outside of the Committee – what does President Trump intend to actually do to keep his promise to the Terry family to get to the bottom of this? And will AG Sessions’ self-recusal on this have any impact on that?

If I seem cynical, you’ll either have to forgive me – or not. The record of how this ball got rolling is right here if anyone is interested.  Mike Vanderboegh and I were pleading then for Congress and the media to do something meaningful then, and people have no idea what that effort actually required and took.  I’m tired of pleading. It’s enough that we have been borne out, even if we and a handful are the only ones likely to ever be aware of those efforts.

Even fewer will ever realize that had Oversight not ignored our public pleas from a few years earlier, ATF would have been under scrutiny in 2009, before they ever started sanctioning gunwalking.

Bottom line: If the upshot of all this is words, finger-pointing, political gamesmanship, media placement and no results, this report will be representative of nothing so much as a line from Macbeth:

[I]t is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Prove me wrong, Oversight Committee. I beg you.

NOTE: Some of the links used in this article will be slow-loading. The referenced articles originally appeared on the now-discontinued Examiner.com site and are now only retrievable via the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine.

Here’s the related Committee recording of “Fast and Furious: Six Years Later”:

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If you believe in the mission of Oath Keepers, to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, please consider making a donation to support our work.  You can donate HERE.

Spreading ‘Lies of Omission’ Can Be a Good Thing

T.L. Davis (L) shares ideas (and some beer) around my fire pit.

“David – I’m in the locale. Would you like me to stop by with a rough cut of the film?” T.L. Davis emailed me yesterday afternoon.

He was passing through Ohio on his way westward after wrapping up some last-minute items with Gun Owners of America’s Larry Pratt in Virginia. Larry is one of the interview subjects featured in the 12 Rounds Production documentary “Lies of Omission,” a film intended to broach and explore what the media and political establishment suppress and pass on to Millenials “unique perspectives on American Freedom … and … demonstrate the value of America and what is worth saving.”

T.L. was on a tight schedule to make the film’s pre-release work-in-progress screening Saturday in Cañon City, Colorado. I texted him a directions link and he got to my place around 5:00 p.m. He took a few more establishment shots for possible inclusion in the final cut and we loaded his disc in the DVD player. I gotta say, although you can dismiss my opinion as subjective if you like (because it kind of is), I really enjoyed it, and not just because I’m in it.

Also part of the documentary are former SEAL and “bleeding edge” novelist Matt Bracken of Enemies Foreign and Domestic trilogy fame, “freedomista” author Claire Wolfe, liberty writer Kit Perez of the Patrick Henry Society, Order of the White Rose and Liberty Nation, and my departed friend and colleague, citizen journalist Mike Vanderboegh.

The film was moderated and directed by T.L.’s daughter Sammi Lee Davis, a recent film school graduate and budding professional. The intent is to pass on a liberty message to people of her generation, and as such, she was the catalyst for ensuing conversations. It’s also evident that it’s a labor of love, and a testament of the type of bond a father can have with his daughter.

Naturally, with the people involved, the discussion heavily involved Second Amendment principles, but in the context of being a means of protecting all freedoms. There’s also history, personal anecdotes, philsophical discussions, the importance of the Constitution, the unfolding totalitarian threats the target audience will face. And what you’ll get are real responses from the interviewees. No one was given questions in advance.

We had all been filmed separately over the course of many months as T.L. and Sammi Lee traveled to where we each live — they’d actually visited with Vanderboegh in Alabama almost a year before they made it up north to see me. T.L.tells me they have much more footage of Mike that can be part of a separate project — hours of conversation with the guy that won’t fit into the current documentary, but will certainly be a legacy resource I’m expecting to hear more about.

As an aside, having Mike in my living room on the big screen almost made me forget he’s gone, and made watching all the more poignant when the reality of his passing would creep in unbidden and inescapable.

With the documentary watched and discussed (it turns out most of my suggestions had already been incorporated in a later edit), we went to dinner at a local restaurant and then came back to enjoy the first fire of the season in my backyard fire pit. We were joined by my oldest son, 26, his girlfriend, 23, and my youngest son, 22. They’re exactly the audience T.L. finds critical for passing the film’s messages on to, and among the age group most heavily influenced by ANTIFA subversion. They and T.L. hit it right off and were engaged and interested, and he told me later how much he enjoyed the almost nonstop exchange of agreeable ideas about freedom and perspectives on the conditions we face. I also got a call from Armed American Radio host and friend Mark Walters, and that gave me a chance to introduce him to T.L. over the phone.

The conversation and the fire lasted ’til 1:00 a.m., at which point I put T.L. up in the guest room and set the coffeemaker up for morning. He rousted me four hours later so we could say goodbye and he could get back on the road to make the screening in time.

As I said earlier, I’m biased, but I factor that in to my endorsement of this project and how much I enjoyed seeing the near-finished product. There are some trailers that have been released that will give you a taste of what T.L.and Sammi have created, but just a taste. After seeing the rough cut, I want more and can’t wait to see the final.

You can find out more about this project(and help out with the financing!) at:

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If you believe in the mission of Oath Keepers, to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, please consider making a donation to support our work.  You can donate HERE.

‘Adversarial Journalist’ Fails to ‘Intercept’ Truth about Oath Keepers

What does any of this have to do with Oath Keepers? If you listen to SPLC, DT Analytics, Democrat DHS apparatchiks and The Intercept, they’re practically inseparable. If you actually cherish the truth, not a thing, and membership there would disqualify from membership here. [Library of Congress Public Domain/CC-0]

“The FBI has quietly investigated white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement,” VICE News, Al Jazeera America, and New York Times contributor and all-around social justice warrior Alice Speri “reports” in The Intercept.

Self-described as “dedicated to producing fearless, adversarial journalism,” The Intercept gives Speri a platform to demonstrate exactly how provincial and insulated from her “flyover country” subject matter an Italian-born Bronx resident can be. Still, that’s no excuse for sloppy, one-sided agitprop masked as “real reporting,” although why she should be any different from her peers in the “mainstream” is a fair question to ask.

Eager to advance a meme developed and honed in the Obama administration, that the greatest threat to U.S. domestic tranquility originates from evil “conservatives,” Speri continues the successful practice of conflating Constitutionalists with “white supremacists” and haters, and nowhere is that more demonstrably disprovable than in her all-too-familiar smear job on Oath Keepers.

A primary source for raising the “extremism” flag? A 2009 report from Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security, specifically identifying those opposed to illegal immigration and “disgruntled military veterans” as groups meriting special scrutiny over domestic terror concerns. That would be the same DHS that relied on the Southern Poverty Law Center in a subsequent “intelligence assessment” exercise in politically-inspired conflation.

“Mark Potok’s armed DHS sock puppet parrots SPLC lines — again,” friend and colleague, the late Mike Vanderboegh observed at the time, dismissing the report with the jaded candor of someone who has seen the con before. “It looks to me like all these high-paid tax feeders did was regurgitate Potok’s latest lies…”

While admitting that Napolitano subsequently backed off the 2009 report due to flak, that tradition appears to be continuing unabated at The Intercept. Not only did Speri rely on SPLC as a primary go-to source, but also parroted without challenge the report’s lead researcher, Daryl Johnson (now head of DT Analytics, a consulting firm pinning its fortunes on continued demand for the SPLC narrative:

Johnson singled out the Oath Keepers and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association for their anti-government attitudes and efforts to recruit active as well as retired law enforcement officers. “That’s the biggest issue and it’s greater now than it’s ever been, in my opinion.”

Oh, really?

“Anti-government”? This is a group that at its core exists to encourage current and retired military, police and first responders to keep their oath to “support and defend the Constitution [and] bear true faith and allegiance to the same,” and that restricts membership in its Bylaws with this requirement:

No person who advocates, or has been or is a member, or associated with, any organization, formal or informal, that advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States or the violation of the Constitution thereof, shall be entitled to be a member or associate member.

And as for being in any way affiliated with “white supremacists,” again, one need only check the Bylaws:

No person who advocates, or has been or is a member, or associated with, any organization, formal or informal, that advocates discrimination, violence, or hatred toward any person based upon their race, nationality, creed, or color, shall be entitled to be a member or associate member.

Go ahead, search inside. Some might classify this fixation on demonizing those who honor their oath to the Constitution as an obsession, and wonder why.

Perhaps with Hillary Clinton’s loss in November, DT Analytics is in desperate search of a public/private partnership from which to feed (especially if Johnson’s YouTube viewership is any indication of interest). Presumably, sales aren’t exactly brisk for his “Right-Wing Resurgence: How a Domestic Terrorist Threat is Being Ignored” (with a Foreword, unsurprisingly, by SPLC’s Mark Potok!), but at least Amazon’s “Look inside” function gives us a chance to see just how badly they want to include Oath Keepers in that threat, and how accurate what he’s saying about them is.

For instance, right there in Chapter One, page 4, we’re told:

“On April 11, 2009, the day on which the DHS assessment was leaked, the Oath Keepers had not yet announced their existence publicly.”

What is this? And this? And…

Back in March, 2009, I’d blogged that Oath Keepers was featured on the G.Gordon Liddy Show (and on an Arkansas radio program). And they’d posted a video announcing themselves on YouTube. I actually first blogged on Oath Keepers here.

If the head of DT Analytics totally blows the basics like this, what else can’t we trust, and what should that say to anyone thinking about retaining his consultancy “services”? And if Oath Keepers actually were a threat, what does it say about so many of us knowing about them while our “Homeland Security professionals” remained blisssfuly oblivious, awaiting SPLC agenda instructions?

And what does it say of the journalistic standards of The Intercept, parroting that agenda while the truth about Oath Keepers lay a couple minutes of internet checking and a bias and presumption-free introductory phone call away? Assuming truth was ever the objective…?

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If you believe in the mission of Oath Keepers, to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, please consider making a donation to support our work.   You can donate HERE.